My 2 cents on this: Being a jerk can work sometimes. Take the fictional character Gavin Belson from the show Silicon Valley as an example: He's not what we wo

My 2 cents on this: Being a jerk can work sometimes. Take the fictional character Gavin Belson from the show Silicon Valley as an example: He's not what we would call a Leader but he has this egocentric selfish view of himself. He shares no emphatic towards people around him, which means that he can virtually do anything without caring too much. You might say he is an asshole (he is) but he will carry his vision on no matter what. Is this guy healthy? He represents someone that no one likes. Every single employee hates hims, his ideas are terrible, he will run over people without blinking, etc. In sports look at Cristiano Ronaldo, you can find early interviews when he was younger and didn't had any awards. If you asking who is the best football player in the world he would instantly reply: Me Some years later he actually become one of the best all time football players. You might say he has an unhealthy amount of self confidence which can be seen as arrogance. From a young age he carried this belief system/mindset that brought it several awards and broke record after record. He is completely obsessed with training that at age 33, his body has a metabolic age of 23! About 6 years ago I saw an article saying that, according to his physical therapist, he would play at a world class until age 36 and, so far, it is happening. We can question if Ronaldo has a healthy dose of self belief. He gets things done on the pitch and we might ask at what cost? He could work a LOT less and be a decent player with millions on his bank account. No need to push his limits every single. The same happens with developers: If you believe in open source you'll be willing to use and write open source tools despite the fact that there are closed source solutions. We could argue that this is not healthy because you're wasting your time when you could get things done in a much shorter amount of time. Same with CEO: They all believe their product is the best and sometimes (I work with several) they seems nuts and as a developer I've to be their therapist sometimes so that their product doesn't looses touch with reality and becomes something wild that no one understands. In the examples above it's very subjective to quantify/measure what an healthy dose of self belief looks like. You could say that they are all nuts and you would have a point: Gavin Belson believes he is the next Steve Jobs. Ronaldo believes he is the best no matter what. Open source developers believe that closed source code is evil. CEOs believe they're the next Steve Jobs or some cliche like changing the world for better If we kill the Ego/"Cognitive Distortions"/"Mental Disorders", there is nothing extraordinary about these people. Having a belief, regardless of being true of false, will have the effect of you acting upon it. Can you make 10 million dollars? Answer 1: No Answer 2: yes If you answer No, I'm 99.9% sure you won't because you won't even try. If your answer is Yes, you'll try and you might succeeded at it. You won't might suffering along the journey to make it. I find it very hard to classify what is a mental disorder or a personality trait. It can go both ways: wonderful or terrible. It's a very subjective topic, to classify this as a "Cognitive Distortions" (in a negative way) is like saying that creative people and leaders should be placed in a mental institution or something like that. Some traits like kindness, empathy, helping the poor, etc. are nice things that we should nourish in our society but they might get in the way of creating value/getting things done. The idea might be scary but a psychopath doesn't gets dragged/delayed like "normal"/empathetic people. They try to get what they want without caring about the cost.